How Capitola Became a City

by Carolyn Swift - former Director, Capitola Historical Museum

"Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into"
-Don Marquis, U.S. humorist, 1927.

A little Chow named Suey saved Capitola the night it relinquished all it had been during Prohibition.

In the wee hours of morning on February 8, 1933, the pooch caught the scent and heard the crackling pops of a blaze out of control. Suey barked until her mistress, Capitola Postmaster Lulu Dunn, woke up to investigate. Peering out the windows of the Post Office building on the corner of San Jose and Capitola Avenue, she saw flames "eating the sky" as they headed north through the village.

Dunn sounded the alarm for a fire already raging beyond Capitola's ability to cope. Nearly an hour passed before Aptos, Soquel, and Santa Cruz fire fighters arrived on the scene to back up a panicky crew of local volunteers. One got so excited he pulled the plug on the main line into the flat, cutting off power to the well booster pump for a full fifteen minutes. Firemen watched helplessly until the other teams rushed in to siphon water from Soquel Creek.

Dunn scooped up her dog and the village mail and whisked both to safety as the Post Office blistered in the heat. Deputy Sheriff R.J. Clark pooled helpers downtown to prevent looting, as frenzied business owners pushed furniture, store fixtures, and merchandise away from the blaze. Belle Cuneo of Cuneo's Market mustered friends to move her merchandise across the street, and by 9 am, she was at work selling supplies and groceries in the neighboring store of Harry and Violet Rose.

Not everyone was so lucky. Total losses for local merchants were estimated above $150,000. Only a few had been able to afford the high premiums for insurance. Carl Sneath's grocery was engulfed, as were the restaurants Frank's Place, Casey's, the Blue Bell, and the Blue-and-White. Dickinsen's Curios, the Chinese Gardens, and the town pool hall also shared the fate of Hawaiian Gardens. Long before daylight, the sector of wood frame buildings between San Jose and Stockton Avenue was a smoldering mass. Only the Canepa building at the top of the Esplanade stood above the immense pile of rubble.

Frederick Hihn's old Camp Capitola was no longer recognizable. H. Allen Rispin's Capitola by-the-Sea was charred to a crisp. Yet while the coals were hot, Capitola fanned its determination to rise from the ashes in time for the tourist season. No one yet realized it, but the village's resolve was rising like a tidal wave and would far exceed the catastrophe of the fire. The momentum created by the fear of economic disaster aimed Capitola toward a whole new blueprint for its future. In fact, within the next sixteen years, the breezy, seaside resort would tread away from its unincorporated neighbors and stand on its own as a full-fledged city.

A Field of Dreams

This was a handy time for Capitola to have a hero in town. Baseball great Harry Hooper (inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971), had been coach of the Princeton team in 1930 when Depression-era funding cuts forced him to find another way to feed his family. Hooper also sacrificed his orchards in the Sacramento Valley, but steadfastly held onto his real estate business and property in Capitola. Now a full-time resident, he was active in the Democratic Party and an outspoken member of the business community.

Hooper's real estate office was lost in the fire, but the man himself was thinking on his feet. "I consider the wrecked block the best for business locations in town, and we now have the opportunity of reconstructing along permanent lines at minimum cost," he told news reporters. "This will be helpful to Capitola as a resort city."

Like the civil engineer and pro that he was, Hooper sized up the situation. Prohibition was ending, and the Depression was winding down. Capitola desperately needed at least one nightclub to stay afloat, not to mention a better water supply and a fire department that knew which way to point the hose. Furthermore, the resort's sewer system, installed a half century before by F.A. Hihn, had just been condemned by the health department. It wasn't a pretty picture, but if people moved fast enough there was a slight chance something could be done in time.

On the bright side, Capitola had some good team players. R.V. Burdge, another realtor, joined forces with Hooper in orchestrating Capitola Enterprises. Chamber President E.V. Woodhouse, owner of the old hotel that was lost to fire in 1929, had been out beating the bushes for the last few years, trying to drum up syndicate interest in reconstructing on his site. Now, as president of the Chamber of Commerce and owner of the beach side amusement company, he was also leading the drive to get the new sewer system in place by the season's opening in May.

Finally, in April, there came a long-awaited announcement in the paper: "Beer to Be Here For Breakfast." Thirteen dry years Santa Cruz County had ended. What had been known in the Twenties as "giggle water," was back in town and legal again. Capitola suffered the set back of two more serious fires that spring. Pooling scarce reserves, residents and merchants collected $70 to supply the fire department with coupling equipment and an extension ladder. The commitment downtown was growing. In early May, Woodhouse boldly announced that a "big and modern dance hall" with a spring maple floor would be built on the site of his old hotel. Conspicuously, the amusement proprietor sent a telegram to Washington inviting President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a Chamber dance. Woodhouse then turned around and announced to the press that Roosevelt "expressed thanks, and intimated that the only reason he will not be at Capitola next Saturday night is that it will be impossible to come to California this week."

Capitola had no problem with marketing, but what it needed now was a new dance hall, and fast. Hooper moved into action and set up negotiations between Maria Bertolucchi, his former landlady, and Clinton P. Davidson, president of the Oakland Speedway Association. The outcome was a proposal for a one-story structure with 12,000 feet of floor space running 200 feet along Capitola Avenue.

The Whole Nine Yards

Joining in as a designer of the new-and-improved Capitola was contractor Earle McCombs, who seems to have reconstructed most of the village at record-breaking speed. He and his crew of forty Santa Cruz carpenters put up the Big Top Ballroom in an amazing sixteen days start-to-finish. Sam Miller, former manager of the Roof Garden Café in San Francisco, brought in Val Valente, the "Great Maestro and the Pacific coast's most popular dance and radio band conductor" to dig up the first shovel of dirt to begin construction along the east side of Capitola Avenue at Stockton Avenue. Hooper designed space in the same building for his real estate office, but would soon move next door into a new Post Office.

The baseball hero, "considered the most prominent Democrat in Capitola," was recommended for the postmaster's job by the Democratic Central Committee. Appointed in June, 1933, he held the post nearly a quarter-century until his retirement. It looked as if Capitola's business district was making a lightning recovery. But what seemed like rapid progress was a wishful illusion. The "Big Top Ballroom" opened as promised with splashy fanfare but disappeared at the end of the season with hardly a ripple. Its square box was polished with a new floor, stucco finish, tile roof, and reopened with the name "New Hawaiian Gardens," in 1934, but the season performers, "The Stanford Ambassadors," flopped as poorly as those at the Big Top. The identity crisis spread as shopkeepers hustled to promote Capitola as an flourishing entertainment hot spot. Suddenly, the word "casino" appeared everywhere-"Casino Bath House," "Casino Club," and "Casino Restaurant," were on the Esplanade (there was even a "Casino Barber Shop").

Something wasn't right. The village crown-the site of the old hotel-remained embarrassingly vacant. Finally, in 1935, a small dance hall was built alongside the Golden Poppy Beer Garden. The New Hawaiian Gardens on Capitola Avenue was then chopped into sections and dragged the few blocks to the water's edge. The shuffle worked. All the buildings together became the Capitola Ballroom, owned by Lowell and Everett Vetterle, well-known Capitola bulb growers. (Known after World War II as the Capitola Rink, the popular ballroom ended its days as the Saba, Brad Macdonald's dance club that burned in 1957.)

The community managed to keep the resort alive through the Thirties. As the decade closed, people had already begun to speak of incorporation. Initially Capitola tried to recruit the interest of Soquel, since the fortunes of the two were so closely tied together (Soquel had complained that it suffered almost as much as Capitola from the economic trauma of the 1933 fire). The Chamber of Commerce for the two communities did unite for a number of years, but the idea of a single city faded when the Santa Cruz-Watsonville Highway cut between them.

Push Comes To Shove

Led by its Chamber, Capitola seriously debated incorporation as soon as World War II was over. Once again, problems of water, sewage disposal, decent lighting, and street maintenance troubled the village just when it was shaking out the welcome mat for summer visitors. After years of doing without the support or guidance of singular owners, Capitola was getting annoyed with what it considered to be minimal help from a county government that still treated it like a private enterprise.

An incorporation attempt in 1946 failed because of petty squabbling on both sides, pro and con, although the community was increasingly bold in asserting itself on common issues. This was particularly evident when J. Beldon Bias, Jr. (nephew of Judge Harry Bias, former co-owner of the Hawaiian Gardens) decided to put a building on the Capitola Beach.

Bias owned more than 2,000 feet near the Capitola bandstand, and agreed to allow Realtor M.C. Hall to use a small 40-by-50 foot strip for his office. The building went up, but within hours was gone again, "mysteriously" burned to the ground. Capitola Chamber officials lobbied to stop construction along the center of the beachfront, the main point of public access. Threatened by a lawsuit, Bias eventually relinquished most of the beach property to the State Parks Department.
Capitolans took concrete steps toward incorporation in 1948, just as the new highway neared completion.

"Capitola could well be the 'gem' of the ocean cities," read the flyer of the newly organized Improvement Club, "but to beautify, we must first have local control. Then only can we control the quality of new growth…Do you like weed grown lots? Do you like the 'Sometimes Lighted' globes hung on telephone poles? Are you proud of the litter on the streets and beach that is such a joy to rats and consequently fleas? The Capitola Improvement Club is a group of people who really want to do something about it!"

Improvement Club leaders Jack Rosensteel, President, and John Battistini, publicity chairman, were joined in their efforts by young Brad Macdonald, the founder and co-owner of the Shadowbrook Restaurant. Promising lower taxes, neighborhood improvements, and a savings on electricity, gas and telephone rates, the incorporation promoters needed to win enough signatures for a special election. Collected names had to represent 25 percent of the land values between the beach and the freeway, and from Forty-first to Park Avenue.

The spur for incorporation was the age-old sewage problem that was threatening once again to close the beach. Local efforts in recent years had been along the lines of "what tourists don't know won't hurt them," but that was no longer true. Of all the reasons listed for incorporation, sewage was the one printed in capital letters.

"AT PRESENT NOTHING IS BEING DONE TO CORRECT THE SEWER DISPOSAL PLANT WHICH IS CAUSING THE CONDEMNATION OF THE BEACH," wrote Battistini, who promised a solution would be the first act of the elected council if the incorporation vote was successful.

Among those who disagreed was Ed Huber, one of the firefighters in the big fire of '33. Huber said raw sewage had been washing out into the bay for years, but the shopkeepers and Improvement Club members themselves had suppressed the news.
"Those favoring incorporation had the beach closed at this time in order to scare the people and make them think we can't get a sewer system without incorporation," said Huber, who called the election bid "a foolish plan."

All in all, Capitola's drive to become a city was an exceedingly humble move. Petitions were carbon-copied on punched and lined binder paper, and signed in pencil. Macdonald, through the Shadowbrook, paid for most of the advertising.

A New Year's Municipal Baby

The vote to create the City of Capitola was won on January 4, 1949, by a vote of 297 to 243, a waver thin leeway of only 54 votes. No sooner was this battle won than the real fights started. Officially incorporated on January 11, the first council action was not a solution to raw sewage on the beach, but to officially choose the first council's mayor. Macdonald, already paraded through the streets as the election's front-runner, was judged "too young" at the age of 27 years. He was passed over for the official title. Instead, 63 year-old Harlan P. Kessler, a longtime real estate and insurance agent, was given the honor.

People were furious. A crowd of several hundred threatened to march on Kessler's home, and were dissuaded only pleading by Macdonald, Rosensteel, and the local police.

One letter captured the feeling of betrayal. Roger Bates of the Capitola Radio and Appliance Service typed a note to Mayor Kessler canceling his insurance policies. The anger was aimed not only at Kessler, but to Councilman Martin Adamson, who had supported this seeming breach of faith.

"I will not do business with a Judas, nor with a person who would ally himself with that fat fool Adamson," he wrote, "Mail my refund check at once, and don't bother to drop in at the shop for I do not care to even look at you."

Although this was the clash that dubbed Capitola "Scrapitola," it wasn't the toughest battle. The Council soon found itself facing off against the very same Chamber of Commerce that had been its primary backer. Chamber members, realizing they were about to lose the newly-built community hall on Capitola Avenue, balked when city officials tried to move in. Kessler argued an agreement was made before the election, stipulating the hall would become the center of the new municipal government. In reply, chamber director Andy Campodonico waved the deed.

"There's nothing in any of the minutes of the chamber of commerce which shows that this building was to revert to the city," he complained, "There certainly would have been if the chamber or its directors, or the donors who built it, thought it should go to city administration."

Council members had to admit they'd received at least six letters from donors upset about the city takeover.

In the end, the city had to settle into a small cottage down in the village, across the street from Capitola Theater. The community building became city hall after prolonged negotiations and a purchase agreement Kessler arranged with the chamber.

It was a good thing the catalyst that boosted Capitola through the Depression was still in evidence in those first shivery days as a municipality, because some pretty embarrassing and more than a few hilarious moments lay ahead (not the least being a move to disincorporate in 1952). It's this part of Capitola history worthy of celebration-not the election itself, or the events that followed-but the spirit and identity that was so strong it proved Capitola able to rescue itself from just about anything.